If you got more XP for knocking everyone out then why how does "no bodycount=no XP"?

Because in this context by body I mean unconscious or dead bodies vs guards who are still standing having never noticed you sneaking past. My point is stealth was sacrificed to create a game that's about stealth takedowns. By not killing or knocking out any guards in HR you would miss out on the bulk of the available xp

In The thief series there are no rewards for taking down guards, except in one or two specific missions. In fact Thief 2 has one mission where you must not takedown more than 3 guards and another where a single takedown or being seen is an instant fail.

I'm hoping the new thief game sticks to this rather than using an HR-like "points for takedowns" mechanic

To be honest it seems to me that if you get more XP from silent takedowns/kills then it looks like they're trying to encourage the use of stealth.

People have different views of stealth. Some, like you or me, believe that "Not being seen, nor heard" is stealth. Regardless if you silently killed or knocked out half the complex.

Others, like the ones above, believe that stealth means no touching anyone and getting around without being seen or heard. It is harder and a hell of a lot of fun, but both ways are considered stealth.

Busard:Yeah um...still not convinced really. If killing remains the dominant strategy, that's still a design flaw in my book (although i'll wait and see the actual game)

But the fact that they're talking about it like it's an OPTION while it was a core feature in the past games is kinda worrying. This is not an assassin/press X to silent takedown game. Engaging people should be the least wanted approach.

Exactly. The developers need to remember that Thief is a stealth game, not a Deus Ex style Choose-Your-Play-Type stealth/action game. The thing that made Thief special was that you had the power to get yourself out of crappy situations with maybe a single guard or two, but it was at its core a stealth game.And let me just say they better not have a pre-done take-down animation like Deus Ex and Dishonored had.

Lastly, as an insanely worried but hopeful fan, let me offer a nit-pick.

It's good that you can go through without killing anyone, though, for a Thief game, that should be a given. However, the question that really needs to be answered is, Can you get through the game without ALERTING anyone? My favorite thing to do in Thief 1 & 2 was to try and shadow through as many levels as I could, feeling like the ultimate Thief when no one even knew I was ever there. THAT is what I truly want to know.

My only hope is that there are no levels like the Thieves Guild in the original Thief. OH god I hated that level so freakin' much. Everything looked the same and it was confusing as all hell to get around. 5 hours for a single level on expert is not fun. It just gets really tedious -_-

However, I also hope that the difficulty is more akin to the originals where it would give you more objectives per level. That would be awesome, however I doubt they will do that.

Capitano Segnaposto:People have different views of stealth. Some, like you or me, believe that "Not being seen, nor heard" is stealth. Regardless if you silently killed or knocked out half the complex.

Others, like the ones above, believe that stealth means no touching anyone and getting around without being seen or heard. It is harder and a hell of a lot of fun, but both ways are considered stealth.

It comes down to "Stealth" needing a sub-genre or descriptor, if we're doggedly clutching at labels. Stealth can be differentiated from a stealthy assault, wherein the former requires getting in and out with nobody any the wiser apart from their pockets being lighter and the latter involves everyone waking up the next morning with a hangover. The Thief series has typically been the former (and, say, Splinter Cell the latter) and it could be debated the former is "true" stealth. So in that respect this news isn't really news at all, it's really just a given and it'll just leave folks - or at least long-term fans of the franchise - waiting for the qualifying detail.

Ah I see, they are appealing to the mainstream crowd mostly via the mechanics of the game...We all know that scaling is a cheap and ineffective way of altering difficulty whereas designing difficulty is what makes a game difficult.

Agreed, in the original thief games difficulty was all about extra objectives and restrictions. In fact i always played the thief games on max difficulty simply because each mission had more content that way. Scaling just smacks of a quick fix solution.

I see this a different way, to make it difficult but still possible (original thief with extra loot on high difficulty) the levels will have to be designed well and interesting. Scalability will probably be on amount guards / field of view and distance of sight / noise level. This way the game can be made easier for casuals or newbies without compromising on level design.

Basically they can still make Thief as good as the original, but be able to tone it down for newbies. I don't see a problem with this.

I hope your right, i really do, a mix of extra content and enhanced perception would work, The thief series is one of my favorites, done right a sequel could be awesome, done wrong it would be a tragic waste of opportunity

MercurySteam:I get it but in HR if you're not seen (regardless if you take out guards or not), the game classifies you as stealthy.

K, whatever, either your still missing my point or just ignoring it and trolling

Points are kinda hard to miss considering how sharp they are and........ oh wait. In my book not being seen or heard is stealth regardless of if you take people down or not. This is clearly not how you see this, so how about we call it a GG and leave it at that?

MercurySteam:I get it but in HR if you're not seen (regardless if you take out guards or not), the game classifies you as stealthy.

K, whatever, either your still missing my point or just ignoring it and trolling

Points are kinda hard to miss considering how sharp they are and........ oh wait. In my book not being seen or heard is stealth regardless of if you take people down or not. This is clearly not how you see this, so how about we call it a GG and leave it at that?

Yes lets, because its Soo difficult to understand the difference between a game that rewards all approaches and a game that loads its rewards towards one particular approach.

Awesome. I did that with Deus Ex human Revolution. I played it stealthy and with guns, and then replayed it without killing anyone or setting off alarms. :-)It was a lot of fun as the AI worked and when you got seen, it was never due to a glitch or the game cheating.

K, whatever, either your still missing my point or just ignoring it and trolling

Points are kinda hard to miss considering how sharp they are and........ oh wait. In my book not being seen or heard is stealth regardless of if you take people down or not. This is clearly not how you see this, so how about we call it a GG and leave it at that?

Yes lets, because its Soo difficult to understand the difference between a game that rewards all approaches and a game that loads its rewards towards one particular approach.

I know right? And I thought I was the only one who had that problem. Good to know I'm not alone.

MercurySteam:I get it but in HR if you're not seen (regardless if you take out guards or not), the game classifies you as stealthy.

K, whatever, either your still missing my point or just ignoring it and trolling

Points are kinda hard to miss considering how sharp they are and........ oh wait. In my book not being seen or heard is stealth regardless of if you take people down or not. This is clearly not how you see this, so how about we call it a GG and leave it at that?

He means he wants to be able to be thief who gets past everyone without making any contact whatsoever, like a true master-thief would. He is also saying that in the original thief you were penalised for this style of play as you miss out on the experience that knocking people out would have given you, after all the game is called Thief, not whack-a-mole.

He does hava a point, getting through a level without anyone knowing you were even there is quite a cool challenge, and it would be good if this was taken into consideration in the next game.

I'm glad they're not trying to goof this up. If you HAD to kill anyone in a Thief game it wouldn't be Thief.

Pretty much summed up my thoughts on Thief 4. At least this is a sign that the developers are considering the original intention of the Thief games - that the primary goal is stealing, not assassinating or slitting the throats of random guards.

After all, according to Yahtzee's Splinter Cell: Conviction review, it is often more fun (and humiliating) to leave guards alive while you loot everything they were supposed to be guarding.

K, whatever, either your still missing my point or just ignoring it and trolling

Points are kinda hard to miss considering how sharp they are and........ oh wait. In my book not being seen or heard is stealth regardless of if you take people down or not. This is clearly not how you see this, so how about we call it a GG and leave it at that?

He means he wants to be able to be thief who gets past everyone without making any contact whatsoever, like a true master-thief would. He is also saying that in the original thief you were penalised for this style of play as you miss out on the experience that knocking people out would have given you, after all the game is called Thief, not whack-a-mole.

He does hava a point, getting through a level without anyone knowing you were even there is quite a cool challenge, and it would be good if this was taken into consideration in the next game.

Lol, what I was actually saying was in the original Thief/Deus Ex you were Not penalised for this style of play, whereas in the new Deus Ex you are and I was hoping that the new Thief wont follow the example of Deus ExBut anyway, enough bashing my head against a wall for one day.

fezgod:it is often more fun (and humiliating) to leave guards alive while you loot everything they were supposed to be guarding.

:P Agreed. In stealth games I try not to kill. And if I do, I don't want anyone to know until AFTER I'm done. The best infiltrator is one that you never know was there...Until the next morning when you find all the loot is gone, and there's a bunch of unconscious guards in closets.

Although my favourite tactic in Mark of the Ninja is far, far more evil. I like to inflict terror on the guards (either by stringing up one guy in plain sight and then making everyone look at it, or by making a pair of patrolling guards walk into a spike trap, or by a simple poison dart), then cause one to friendly fire all of his buddies, and then I leave that one survivor alive, knowing that he will spend the rest of his life jumping at shadows and being unable to go to the bathroom late at night without crapping himself on the way to the bathroom. XD

Man...Pitch Black must love what I do. I make adults believe in him! :D

Captcha: "ace of spades"?? Why are you telling me to play that game? Isn't it enough that I wound up buying it even though I'll probably never play it again?! >: ( Bad captcha.

Points are kinda hard to miss considering how sharp they are and........ oh wait. In my book not being seen or heard is stealth regardless of if you take people down or not. This is clearly not how you see this, so how about we call it a GG and leave it at that?

He means he wants to be able to be thief who gets past everyone without making any contact whatsoever, like a true master-thief would. He is also saying that in the original thief you were penalised for this style of play as you miss out on the experience that knocking people out would have given you, after all the game is called Thief, not whack-a-mole.

He does hava a point, getting through a level without anyone knowing you were even there is quite a cool challenge, and it would be good if this was taken into consideration in the next game.

Lol, what I was actually saying was in the original Thief/Deus Ex you were Not penalised for this style of play, whereas in the new Deus Ex you are and I was hoping that the new Thief wont follow the example of Deus ExBut anyway, enough bashing my head against a wall for one day.

:/ Yeah I pretty much tarded out on that last post and got my games mixed up, but basically my thoughts

Full stealth, in and out without anyone knowing at all = Awesome

HAVING to play stealth whack-a-mole for XP in a game where you want full stealth = Not Awesome

Okay, good, it wouldn't be a Thief game if you couldn't finish it without killing anyone. Now there's only one more thing I need to know to start being cautiously optimistic about this game: will Stephen Russell provide voiceover for Garrett again? Because there's no way Garrett as a character would work without his voice (at least for me)...

Please don't make in an achievement, please don't make in an achievement, please don't make in an achievement..

It's purely my own issue but I always feel obliged to attempt achievements like that when they come along and often at the expense of my own enjoyment as I repeatedly restart to ensure that perfect run.

Stupid of me, I know, but that's how I am and I hope they don't make it an achievement for that reason.

The thing I'm worried about is the fact that they're saying this as if it is something to be hyped up and excited about.

Yes it is very nice to see Thief allow a no kill run. But the fact somebody had the need to come out and say this seems to imply that this person believed other people thought Thief wouldn't turn out this way, which is weird.

I understand that you killed people in the Thief games (The Trickster (maybe), Karras (sort of maybe, again), and Gamal (I guess, sort of maybe.)

Okay, so the above paragraph... structure. If it can be called that. Seems sort of weak. But what I want to say boils down to this: Why are they revealing this as if it is something new? Yes, I understand that mainstream games have all the killing in the world. But Thief was not expected to be a mainstream game. I don't know anybody that was worried about the Thief games forcing you to kill somebody and I don't understand why the developers felt the need to explicitly state that. Maybe they were just a little worried that people would think that Thief wasn't going very well and simply said that reassure people and it is as innocent as it sounds.

On the other hand, saying that Thief would have no killing sort of sounds like one of those scenes in a cartoon where a character says something like: "Yep, ABSOLUUUUUTELY nothing happening over here! The sink definitely did not explode!" And you can tell they're lying or hiding something.

So seeing the developers go: "Yep! Thief 4 totally allows a no kill playthrough!" I can't help but think: "WHAT DID YOU DOOOO?"

To the developers and more importantly the level designer....good FUCKING luck.

Seriously that is very interesting and to which the last game I can think of that had the minimal amount of combat by choice was TENCHU: STEALTH ASSASSINS. Yes, you did have to eventually fight someone but for a good amount of the game you didn't have to kill anyone except bosses.

Never played a Theif game but I'm certainly interested now considering how rare stealth games are.

So what the devs are saying are they will allow Lethe style play which you could do in all the previous titles and they are announcing this as if its some never before seen feature to wow people? As a veteran thief player I have to say of this announcement that my jimmies are so far unrustled about this new thief game.

I got 3/4 the way through Deus Ex: HR without killing anybody but it just got boring and I never went back to finish it. Plus I MAY have accidentally killed someone...when I knocked him out his body fell off the edge of the building does that count as a murder? I think it does.